Conventional antennas such as monopole antennas, dipole antennas, patch antennas, bond-wire antennas, etc., irradiate the greater part of their energy mainly in an advantageous direction, i.e. either in the vertical direction (elevation plane) or in the horizontal direction (azimuthal plane).
For example, a patch antenna ranks among the directional flat antennas which irradiate the greater part of their energy in the vertical direction. A known patch antenna is depicted in FIG. 1A, for example. FIG. 1B shows the associated directional characteristic; it can be seen that only little radiation to no radiation at all is emitted within the horizontal plane (depicted by points A and B). For this reason communication within said plane is very difficult or not at all possible.
In order to bypass this problem, several solution concepts have already been proposed in conventional technology. For example, FIG. 1C depicts an antenna arrangement 5 known from conventional technology. Said antenna arrangement 5 comprises four individual flat antennas 1, 2, 3, 4 arranged symmetrically around a power distribution unit 6.
As can be seen in FIG. 1D, the four individual antennas 1, 2, 3, 4 are folded up into a cube, each of the four flat antennas forming one side of the cube. Thus, this antenna cube irradiates into the corresponding four directions.
However, what is disadvantageous about this is that the individual antennas are controlled among one another by means of electronic components such as phase shifters, or phase demodulators, switches and the like in order to be able to irradiate and receive, respectively, their powers into the advantageous directions without any mutual destructive interferences.